谁看守守望者?Si Spurrier’s Brief Homage in X-Men: Legacy

It is often said thatWatchmen是有史以来最具影响力的漫画。没有它，漫画就不会有今天，不管是好是坏。但我们到底是怎么走到这一步的?更重要的是，《守望者》对漫画世界有何影响?最终，守望者的遗产是什么?谁监视守望者?

[covers by Mike Del Mundo and Dave Gibbons, respectively]

X-Men: Legacy#9’s Double Homage to Alan Moore’sWatchmen

InX-Men: Legacy#9 by Si Spurrier and Tan Eng Huat, there’s an obvious homage toWatchmen#9 and then there’s a rather subtler homage toWatchmen‘s mystery villain, revealed in the 11th hour, quite literally in the frame of Moore’s narrative, to be an erstwhile superhero, Ozymandias, world’s smartest man. Let’s look at theWatchmen#9 homage first.

1. David and Ruth’s Lunar “Date” Echoes the Martian Sequence inWatchmen#9*

*Spurrier’s timing for his homage is a bit precious—but just you wait! By the time you finish this little essay, that will be the first thing you forget about the shambling freakout that isX-Men: Legacyby Si Spurrier.

Nine years ago, in the ninth issue of Si Spurrier’s two-yearX-Men: Legacyrun, reallya Legion solo book*, David Haller and Ruth (Blindfold) Aldine had their first in-person date, on the Moon of all places—and it wasn’t just vaguely reminiscent of one of the most famous scenes from Alan Moore’sWatchmen(1986); Spurrier alludes, by way of Ruth’s own pop-culture musings, to that eerie and heartbreaking scene between Doctor Manhattan and Laurie Juspeczyk (Silk Spectre) on Mars, a last meeting between jaded ex-lovers (though calling the naked man-god a lover gives the lie to their former relationship). It was a loving homage to what is still the superhero genre’s central critical achievement—a position from which, for almost four decades now, it has yet to be dislodged by any subsequent graphic narrative deconstructive of superheroics. Of course, there was a pressing need for that kind of story at the height of the Cold War (which soon turned out to be the twilight of that long era, to everyone’s surprise). Since the early ’90s, however gradually, the most talented storytellers in mainstream comics (Image included) have simply found their moment, their pressing needs and how to articulate them, elsewhere.

*A Legion solo book?Pffft. Marvel couldn’t get away with that. PutX-Menin the title and have those meddling merry mutants appear throughout to meet adequate sales figures for the two years it ran. (Also, anyone familiar with David Haller’s history before this series will notice that he appears more mature here, which is sensible—letting him grow up just a bit—on the other hand, Ruth is a young teen, so even though these two are presented as roughly of the same age and maturity level (albeit with David having a lot of catching up to do), this sudden romance might justifiably cause discomfort for some readers, especially given the 20-year gap between their respective debuts as preteens—not that such glossed-over awkwardness is in any way exceptional for Big 2 comics. As to the rest of the X-Men guest appearances, we’ll get to that, as Xavier’s son taking up his recently deceased father’s dream for mutant/human harmony is the stated remit of Spurrier’sX-Men: Legacy; and yet the title’s more glaring flaws should be addressed first.

Meanwhile, at least with his Legion and other X-verse work, Spurrier then and now has tackled big issues with the bluntest tools in the superhero medium, rolling himself and readers along in what quickly becomes a narrative avalanche that impresses with its density of ideas and references—but falls apart on a closer look. His storytelling style could not be more different from Moore’s formal mastery of narrative and medium. And what his goals as a writer are, I have no idea.

Now it’s not like the issuesWatchmen处理消失了，但我们感觉和思考它们的方式已经;我们的问题也变得更加复杂，这同样意味着我们的故事实际上继续在回避它们!事实上，在撒切尔/里根(Thatcher/Reagan)时代，财富和生活质量的显著差异随着几乎所有形式的社会福利(无论是以前由国家保障的，还是像美国那样由工会遗留下来的(工会已经衰落，而且在结构和文化上往往具有根本上的种族主义)的崩溃而呈指数级加速，艾伦·摩尔创作了一些大胆的故事，这些故事在政治上更直接，也比当今许多同样人口群体的创作者所能做的更有说服力——在这个世界上，资本主义的可怕贪婪已经成为“事情本来的样子”，世界自然秩序的一部分。

Of course, for our limited purpose in this essay, none of this fascinating historicity really matters. After all, Spurrier’s allusion toWatchman#9 is just focused on the danger of the superpowered orsuper-intelligent*becoming super inhuman—like Doctor Manhattan.

[Watchmenart by Dave Gibbons and John Higgins]

这个术语通常不是指大多数人认为的实用或成熟的智力;相反，它实际上是对经典的傻瓜自我最糟糕冲动的过度强化，远远超过了超级力量或类似的东西:对超人智能的幻想几乎总是对其他人类的不耐烦，以及最终变得更像机器/计算，更不像人类的渴望(即，削弱我们作为根本上的社会/合作动物的本性)。Moore critiques this power fantasy through the figure of ManhattanandOzymandias。但斯普瑞尔放大了这段幻想曲的吸引力，尽管他把它埋在大卫对泽维尔遗产的伤感序曲之下(在他选择的使命中，本质上是拯救世界本身);当然，大卫担心他的任务会把他变成一个怪物，但他为避免这场灾难而做的最后一件事都是关于他的自大。The odd mix of punked-out aesthetic and New Age-y sentiments throughout the Spurrier run ultimately feels like some of the more insufferable aspects of ’90s UK rave culture—an unaware arrogance still on display inLegion of X．(事实上，斯普瑞尔的风格与摩尔完全没有相似之处，但却与莫里森相似得多，尽管有点弱，但可能更像彼得·米利根(Peter Milligan)的风格:古怪、偶尔迷人，但并不完全犀利。)

Now, with just a littleeffortfulreading, we can readmoreinto Ruth’s Manhattan reference than what we get on the page, as we’ll get into below, but nothing about the strange comparison is serendipitous, because Spurrier’s version of Legion is a wild mess and, as chaotic manipulator, significantly more reprehensible to his “romantic” interest than Alan Moore’s dry-ice man-god is to the hapless “girl next door” (Laurie). (Unfortunately, none of this bodes well for the currentLegion of X标题马刺制造者。)

如果读者真的想要比较两个截然不同的角色，那么大卫的挣扎可以被视为曼哈顿的对立面。First off, David is thoroughly embroiled in a fractured emotional life that would be totally alien to Manhattan—who would, indeed, see “the mutant problem” as yet further reason to wash his hands of Earth,not作为一个合理的奇迹。然而，尽管他们有种种不同，他们都可能被诬陷为受伤的自恋者，这可能会让他们很难被爱，但即便如此，这也会让他们作为人类产生共鸣。

Doctor Manhattan is a Cold Fish

Of course, Manhattan is an inherently much harder sell in this regard; his problem as a character and person is that he’s little else beyond a static, godlike ego with no real connections to anyone; he doesn’t spark drama of any kind, except insofar as he is feared or used as a weapon. Nobody inWatchmencares about his abstractions, unless his alienating thoughts cause him to abandon Earth, which is what happens, temporarily at first and then, ultimately, for good. That first time, he returns thanks to the hapless Laurie, not through any sort of clever strategy but simply by exhaustively appealing to whatever sense of humanity he still retains. Whisked away to Mars, without even any air to breathe initially, she is understandably overwhelmed and confused—but her struggle to make sense of what’s happening with Jon almost accidentally results in his low-key/flat affect revelation that humanity might have some worth, after all.

然而，曼哈顿表达个人生活奇迹的方式，实际上是宇宙的独特性，在其冰冷和平淡的情感上是奇怪的;我们无法从内心层面判断他有多真诚。在判断或预测曼哈顿级别的实体时，直觉是失败的。他学会珍惜一个人的存在(比如劳里的)的过程是高度抽象和理性的，这很奇怪，因为他使用的很多语言根本不会让大多数人感到疏远，他们的世界观更多地基于科学而不是宗教教条:很容易说，是的，在浩瀚的宇宙中，我们每个人都是独一无二的，每时每刻，在这个充满生命丰富的小星球上的每一个生物，迷失在我们银河系边缘的无数小星球中。然而，曼哈顿说话的方式以及他花了很长时间才把劳里当作他身边的一个真实的人来回应，这才是让人如此疏远和反感的地方。

他接受“奇迹”的方式感情平淡、理性，缺乏无数世俗争论的雄辩和尖锐，这些争论涉及人类个体生命的价值，更不用说动物生命的价值、各种各样的自主、互助、情感联系、珍惜每一刻等等。坦白地说，劳里对他的意义至少比她作为一个特殊的人继续存在于数十亿其他独特的人中的事实更重要，因此，曼哈顿博士仍然没有达到目标。为了回避实际的诊断，我们可以说曼哈顿的立场是虚无主义的理性主义，最终无法与存在妥协;他只是消失在物理的未知中(宇宙超出了人类的认知，而不是超越[直到杰夫·约翰斯，不幸的是])。

Each uniquely embroiled in his own inner problems, Manhattan and Legion are otherwise almost total opposites.

2. David’s Actions Against the Ozymandias-like Aarkus Echo –Ozymandias

Spurrier’s second allusion toWatchmeninX-Men: Legacy第9条就没那么简单了。一开始，作者对阿库斯的随意吸引，一个漫威黄金时代的跨维度生物，有点像奥兹曼迪亚斯:独自躲在遥远的堡垒里(位于月球而不是南极洲)，这个聪明但孤立，可能是疯狂的超自然生物正在想办法拯救地球，根据大卫对露丝令人恐惧的独白，这肯定包括消灭变种人——马上就消灭。

奥兹曼迪亚斯不像奥兹曼迪亚斯那样，通过并列放置无数个电视屏幕来控制世界的信息流，每个屏幕同时播放不同的内容，而是通过阅读一大堆书籍来了解地球上所有的主要问题。这是摩尔对奥兹曼迪亚斯“世界上最聪明的人”的批评的一个可爱的重复——当然，因为他通过不断消耗同时流动的信息来分析和预测的方法，就像试图在月球上完全孤立地基于书本学习来理解和补救世界上的许多危机一样愚蠢。

But Spurrier goes one better than a mere cute riff here. For David, too, has his Ozymandias moment in this issue, and if I had been Ruth, this would certainly have been an irreversible dealbreaker. But the author was adamant on having these two stick to each other, despite the fact that here David pumps horrific images into Ruth’s mind: of her fellow mutants annihilated by Aarkus as if it’s already happened, when in truth, it’s a vision from one of David’s more twisted personas (tied up with his tortured relationship to his father).

在蹩脚地道歉并透露种族灭绝还没有发生之后，大卫继续第二次欺骗已经双重崩溃的露丝。他想要得到她的同意，暗中追捕阿库斯，趁他睡觉潜入他的基地，抹去他的记忆。他描述了这个计划，直到露丝再次吓坏了，告诉他停止，她不会给他他寻求的许可。但是露丝错了;大卫在寻求她的认可——事实上，仅仅是希望她会认可，他已经抹去了外星人的记忆。

在看到阿库斯昏迷不醒的样子后，她退出了，并坚持要送她回家。他这样做了，把她留在琴格雷学校的门口，让她背负着新的外星负担，毫无疑问，这对她的变种人同伴来说是一个离奇的故事。换句话说，大卫对一个感知到的威胁进行了小小的先发制人的打击，这与奥兹曼迪亚斯牺牲纽约市一半的人口来避免一场由冷战演变成的热核大屠杀的做法非常相似。在这两种情况下，应该让读者感到沮丧的是，两位英雄都没有可证实的证据，证明他们所设想的灾难真的会发生。

[X-Men: Legacyart by Tan Eng Huat, Craig Yeung and Jose Villarrubia]

In David’s own arc during the Spurrier run, this does mark a turn for him in recognizing that pursuing his father’s dream on his own could turn him not just into a monster but one that could very well end the world to boot.

Does Spurrier follow through with these various but connected themes with anything like the clarity Moore achieves inWatchmen? Maybe that’s an unfair comparison, but it’s one that he invites by way of his homage inX-Men: Legacy#9.

Spurrier’s Legion Has Always Been a Hot Mess

仅看这两本书，我们可以看到《曼哈顿》和《军团》各自的命运走向了相反的方向，尽管它们都涉及自我放逐(在大卫的例子中，我认为这是一种自杀——通过明确的暗示而不是严格的文本;so if you’re going to quibble about that fragment left behindin Ruth’s mind*, that’s missing the point, and allowing Spurrier off the hook for not in the least acknowledging the tragic connotations of what David says at the end of his existence, this being just one ofmyriad problems with his Legion run**．

*David inserts a fragment of himself into Ruth’s mind without at all asking for consent. He assumed this young woman would be happy with this piece of a man she hardly knows—and Spurrier assumes exactly the same, which is the last frigging page of hisX-Men: Legacyrun (which may also reference Manhattan’s farewell to Earth/Ozymandias at the end ofWatchmen, to no meaningful effect, because Manhattan, much to Alan Moore’s dismay, was correct: Endings are anathema to Big 2 comics).

Inside Ruth’s head, on issue #24’s penultimate page, David says, “I’m in your head. Always.” On the last, Ruth walks down a hallway among her peers, declaring, “I rule me.” Really? Who exactly is ruling who here? Throughout the run, that line was David’s mantra, not Ruth’s—until she is occupied, without consent.

(Oddly enough, inWay of X#3, Spurrier depicted David attempting to help along a budding romance between Mercury and Loa by allowing their psyches to mingle in a way their bodies could not, due to their powers, but that too-sudden closeness, the dropping away of all barriers to another’s mind, backfired grotesquely. It was ineptly handled on the author’s part, characteristically muddled, and yet contrary in message to the resolution inLegacy．Odd.)

**Another glaring problemis that the most prominent feature here is his villain’s profuse use of racist language to illustrate that racism is dumb, while having his very minor Asian villains early in the run speak English in a way that only merely perpetuates racialized stereotyping; Spurrier’s immature attempt at humor here seems to happily encourage just the sort of parochial/xenophobic idiocy that’s long been a staple of White-dominated pop culture.

If anything, it is specifically Spurrier who took the character out of the ignorant Claremontian mold (as “autistic” and/or “schizophrenic”) to depict what seems much closer to a classic narcissistic disorder, which resonates with David’s suicidal language at the end of the series (“I refuse to submit to a universe where I cannot rule myself”; “This is never being born”; “I was too bloody good for this place anyway”).

(As to Legion’s eventual return, this occurred four years later, sort ofex nihilo, in the 2018LegionMini-Series by Peter Milligan and Lee M. Ferguson, with no explanation of how this was supposed to work followingX-Men: Legacy—which was maybe for the best.)

大卫·哈勒绝对没有表现出对分离性身份识别障碍(DID)的连贯描述，无论如何，在2010年代早期，几乎没有人对这种疾病熟悉。这是一种罕见的情况，即流行文化通过漫画角色突然转向电视，如《军团》，《末日巡逻》和《月亮骑士》。不幸的是，如果我们仅仅关注这些神奇的企业属性，我们只会对它们所代表的混乱更加无知。

For any readers interested in real-world DID, which as a diagnosable disorder afflicts a tiny percentage of the world population, you can compare how vastly different it is from the comic-book version of Legion:Dissociative Identity Disorder – StatPearls – NCBI Bookshelf (nih.gov)．事实上，没有一个写大卫的人真正处理得了这种疾病的痛苦现实，这表明我们对这种极其罕见的疾病的持续无知。(In the 2017-2109Legiontv show, he’s diagnosed as schizophrenic, which is unrelated to DID, and frankly, that was a very wise decision, as was the depiction of David’s ongoing treatment, which was in starkly pointed contrast to theX-Mencinema trope of simply prescribing drugs to mentally ill telepaths.)

That Marvel has “officially” diagnosed Legion with DID (Legion (David Haller) In Comics Powers, Enemies, History | Marvel) is just embarrassing.

当然，那些患有DID的人通常不会为了扭曲的渴望赢得父母的认可而进行操纵和堂吉诃德式的拯救世界的任务，旁观者会被诅咒。

Why Clarity on Mental Health in Fiction Matters

Diagnosing fictional characters is always dicey, but if there’s anything about David that’s relatably human it’s that he suffered intense parental neglect, with one parent being a supreme narcissist, and that has indeed resulted, perfectly understandably, in a wounded narcissist. However, in our current culture, consumers are more interested in fantastical limit cases of neurodivergence than garden-variety narcissism. So labeling Legion a narcissist here, I’ll bet nobody else will run with this. And why should they? Readers nowadays want protagonists who are either more aware of their social privileges or actually do struggle with some form of marginalization. One of the early results in Big 2 comics of this cultural shift, Spurrier’sX-Men: Legacyrecasts a character who’d previously been more ofa cipher*as a personality suffering fundamentally (i.e., beneath a fantasticated caricature or façade) from a relatable, everyday problem endemic to the US (and modern, capitalist cultures of the West more generally)—while masking this mundanity in the “spectacle” of what we now call DID (while getting that disorder almost totally wrong).

*Again,David’s seemingly permanent status as a cipherwas for most writers all too easy to maintain when for the first 20 years of his publication history, our cultural awareness of mental health was practically nil. Until very recently, labeling someone “autistic,” fictional or otherwise, was typically an excuse for neglect, abandonment or simply dismissive indifference. However, I’d like to argue that for a writer to actually deal with this, with a realistically autistic protagonist, would be much more meaningful than reading stories that ignorantly purport to be about one kind of disorder but only really represent another that goes unnamed or unrecognized. In other words, most readers want greater clarity about their heroes, not more confusion and ignorance.

If a writer is going to deal with mental health issues, they need to do so with clarity and not leave readers guessing as to their intentions or level of awareness or ignorance on the particular subject. We shouldn’t be left questioning whether we should diagnose a character ourselves; again, that’s always dicey—the author needs to present this material with care and intelligence if they’re going to handle it at all. WithX-Men: Legacy, Spurrier simply did not do this, and he’s still not doing it withLegion of X(which is just chockfull of broad/vague gestures at fostering a culture of care and mutual aid and yet it’s clearly Vita Ayala who’s been leading in this area with much greater understanding and focus over inNew Mutants, if only at the level of close friendships).

The Dry as Dust Tragedy of the Naked Man-God

InWatchmen, Dr. Manhattansort oflearns better, via his own highly abstract reasoning process in solitude, and returns to Earth to save humankind from itself—which, through further rationalizations, leads him to accept fellow superhero Ozymandias’ plan to destroy most of New York City to avert World War III. The ease with which the godly Manhattan solves this particular Trolley Problem is chilling, and that’s Moore’s point: Manhattan’s humanity is his inhumanity, the kind of modus vivendi we see in practice from those who run the world. That this paradox remains unbearable to Manhattan isn’t unique to him either: Practically by virtue of their positions of power, the wealthy and powerful often wish themselves far away from the mess of their own kind, in some far-off place “less complicated,” never mind the unpleasant reality that their very inability or indifference in effectively wielding the resources at their command is central to what’s wrong with our society.

Power fantasies are almost always subtended by howls of despair, a learned helplessness when it comes to just dealing with the world as it is; once the consolation of these fanciful dreams of power begin to fade, reality returns, no less discordant, cacophonous and difficult to understand—perhaps more so. Of course, fantasy, or rather the whole toolkit of fantasticated storytelling (its tropes and metaphors), can help us to see and feel the world more clearly, in a way that’s empowering to the individual without just being escapist. However, Manhattan as a type in the literature of the fantastic never inspires a reengagement with the world, unless taken as a cautionary tale. (At least he is ultimately happy for Laurie in finding human comfort with Daniel, even though there is surely a trace of condescension in the man-god’s parting smile, before he turns away from the overly “complicated” Earth, to fly off into deep space, to a distant galaxy, where he may well have followed through on his passing suggestion that he could recreate humanity on another world. Why? We could ask the same of, say, those in Silicon Valley who want to evolve sentience out of artificial life merely because it’s a thing that’s possible; plus, such a bizarre method for realizing a power fantasy could simply be a way of sustaining lonely but pampered egos who believe they’ve found their highest calling. This doesn’t seem much different from Manhattan’s far-off vanity project.)

尽管如此，无论曼哈顿的优越地位对大多数人来说是一种安逸的生活，无论这多么奇怪，他的思想中肯定有一些因素在另一种情况下可能是自杀意念的症状，例如，人类不存在会更好，世界没有我会更好，等等;曼哈顿最终摆脱了困境，但我们大多数人没有这个选择。甚至连他自己无法维持关系的能力对他来说似乎也不重要，因为他可以在其他地方创造其他现实，能够突然把自己从任何不愉快的事情中移开，跨越无法想象的距离，与世界上最富有的人没有太大的区别，他们可以用地球上其他80亿人无法想象的方式飞来飞去。

This tragic line of thinking is painfully relevant to Spurrier’s Legion in that it just isn’t for Manhattan—who is in his very presentation monadic. The idea of the monad comes from the ancient Pythagoreans, denoting the prime cosmic substance, i.e. the pan-creator or cosmic totality, but since Leibniz it’s morphed into simply referring to an indivisible unit, a solitary, impervious particle in a universe made up of such particles. The Pythagorean symbol for this concept was the circled dot,almostexactly like the hydrogen symbol on Manhattan’s sleek, hairless head, symbol of his indivisibility and imperviousness, whatever his ability to ghost through and reshape matter; he is always no more or less than what he is, a man who forgot humanity.

Again, this just isn’t David’s own tragedy.

David Is Not a Monad

But it’s the caution taken from Moore’s critique of the inhuman man-god that Ruth voices on the Moon, the pair safely cocooned in David’s little bubble of air—though no less potentially disconcerting than what Laurie experiences when Manhattan teleports her to Mars without thinking of her need to breathe air (because that’s no longer among Manhattan’s own personal concerns).这真是第一次(面对面)约会!Yet the notion that David was really likely to become anything like the naked man-god is hard to fathom—if for no other reason than his central conflict is explicitly his mental health issues, which, again, no writer has really been able to clarify yet, even if we see glimpses here and there, almost by chance, as if writers are relying more on intuition than a thoughtful application of research (which you kind of need to do if you’re dealing with a rare personality disorder).

*How Blindfold isn’t disgusted by Davidmanipulating their encounters into what he calls “dates” when David’s motivations are all about getting her to validate his aggressive power fantasies just deflates the irony of her codename—Spurrier and Legion treat her as alternately gullible or reactive, leading her along until what is, as noted above, a gross violation of her privacy and autonomy.

Manhattan’s emotional state couldn’t be more different, though it would be very unwise to try to diagnose such a fantastical character with a real-world disorder. Regardless, the only overlap the two characters have may be their godlike powers potentially alienating them from humanity (including mutants)—which seems to stand in for the narcissism that clearly defines their isolated personalities, each in his own way. Certainly, David’s situation is more relatable and understandable: the wounded narcissism of the child neglected by narcissistic parents*．

*InX-Men: Legacy#15, his mother, Gabrielle Haller, is a grim depiction of narcissist who’s been as married to her work (Israeli national security) as Xavier ever was—grimly lacking in humor and self-care and yet clearly insufferably smug and driven by self-importance, all very briefly before she takes a bullet meant for her son—who beneficently undoes her death in the series finale, as he deletes himself from reality, retroactively. (If you got a headache from trying to work out how David’s ontological suicide—or whatever you choose to call it—don’t worry: It really doesn’t make any sense, though the story seems to argue that David can make it all work out because he’s just that godlike—“I was too bloody good for this place anyway.”)

In-universe, Ruth makes her passingWatchmenreference where the specific referent (Manhattan) isn’t meaningful beyond exactly what she says (i.e., don’t forget your humanity). Does Spurrier intend us to read more into it, though? Regardless of authorial intent, a closer comparison between the two characters only highlights their lack of meaningful similarity.

If Manhattan is a chilly, godlike monad, David is much more a “nomad”—not necessarily literally (although that too inX-Men: Legacy); this playful but meaningful pun helps us invert and subvert Leibniz’s concept of the modern rationalist (Enlightenment) subject. This clever philosophical punning is from one of the most engaging (and headiest) works of 20^thcentury philosophy/theory,Mille plateaux(1980; trans. into English asA Thousand Plateaus哲学家吉尔·德勒兹(Gilles Deleuze, 1987)和心理学家Félix Guattari，都是在20世纪60年代中后期出现在欧洲的后马克思主义左翼。不过，就我们的目的而言，我们可以简单地说，大卫的游牧生活方式在早期得到了证明，他是无数人物的载体，然后在斯普瑞尔(sprrier)中由他与父母和其他变种人的关系运行，尽管关系很不稳定。现在，需要明确的是，德勒兹和瓜塔里对两种存在模式的认同在道德上是中立的，即使他们主张允许更多的“游牧”进入西方的日常生活。

All this is to say that while Manhattan is an isolate personality who acts unilaterally, Spurrier’s David couldn’t be more different: He’s defined by his relationships even as we see him struggling to establish them for the first time inX-Men: Legacy．(当然，当他擦掉自己时，这一切几乎都是徒劳的。)事实上，在《x战警》的整个宇宙中，我们快乐的变种人之间的互动是无止境的;fans delight in imagining all the permutations and bare degrees of separation between all these characters, whereas the formally contained cosmos ofWatchmenis much more, well, monadic—we have one set of “heroes,” and the story astutely deconstructs their supposed heroism but also goes further in deconstructing their internal relationships with heavy doses of cynicism that are harder to stomach. Coldly self-enclosed, theWatchmenmythos does not lend itself to the kind of ever-broadening fandom as the X-Men.

然而似乎斯普瑞尔认为，让大卫加入不断变化的人际关系的最好方式是让他继承他刚刚去世的父亲的梦想，建立突变人和人类的和谐。And in the wake of Xavier’s brutal murder by a Phoenix-possessed Scott Summers inAvX, this probably did seem to make a lot of sense. But were there perhaps more sensible options? In theAvXaftermath, Legion’s comeback was maybe going to inevitably be tied up with his father’s legacy, and of course, the titleX-Men: Legacywas a shoo-in, since its first iteration was from its inception an Xavier-focused book (although it shifted focus toward the end of Mike Carey’s long run, which was throughout the real highlight of a dark time for the franchise).

Potential Still Untapped

David’s struggle in the Spurrier run is essentially “cure yourself before you use your powers to help humanity (including mutantkind).” However true a sentiment, this is a homily of our own time—i.e., it’s rather alien to much of late 20^thcentury Western culture, including Moore andWatchmen*. This simply isn’t something that gets explored, much less articulated, even if readers can read through the works of ages and find instances where this moralizing could have been put to good use.

*Watchmen它不只是那个世纪的产物，它是一个矛盾的现代主义-后现代主义作品，后现代主义通过“低级”文化媒介及其比喻和人物传达严肃的政治信息，但现代主义在对这种材料的作者和艺术控制方面;它当然缺乏后现代主义的娱乐性——它在态度和形式上，或者说在叙事控制上是现代主义的。Watchmen’s own potential was pretty much exhausted the first time round, resulting in a “perfect” graphic novel; directly mining this vein decades later, DC is only stupidly undermining the story’s original impact and its legacy.

If I were suddenly tasked with writing a Legion book, rather than looking to the regular X-Men mythos, more likely sources of inspiration for me would be classic psi-talent stories like Stephen King’sFirestarter, Roald Dahl’sMatilda, or even John Wyndham’sThe Chrysalidsor, most idiosyncratic,And Chaos Diedby Joanna Russ. These are all excellent novels, however imperfect in their way, that explore matters resonant to David Haller, far more so thanWatchmenor even the current Krakoa narrative.

自2014年以来，斯普瑞尔已经成为一名成熟的作家，但他的故事讲述仍然采取了一种极端主义的方式，显然是希望某些东西能够坚持下去。对于两大漫画公司来说，这种方法并不能很好地突出个人角色的发展，特别是在当前的市场中，这个行业被极度短期的计划和无情的快速的创意变动所主导。他的风格似乎不适合对他的影响形成者(摩尔、莫里森、米利根等)所探索的主题进行集中扩展;通常只有足够的空间来表达简短的敬意，一些手势会让有经验的读者忽略掉已经熟悉的比喻，一些美食容易吞咽，几乎不费力地制作，很快就会被忘记。